Companies That Treat Engineers Like McDonald's Crew End Up Losing Everyone

Late-night shifts. Companies that don’t understand “standby” are usually in trouble

I once worked on maintenance and development for an entertainment service.

It was a typical ops-and-maintenance gig, but once a month, we absolutely had to run “month-end processing.”

Things like awarding points to users, settlement processing, that sort of thing.

These days you’d be told “just automate it,” and honestly, you’d be right.

A design that requires late-night work every single month is not ideal.

But realistically, there is data you can only cut at night, and there are business needs tied to monthly closing cycles.

So every month, at month-end, a few fellow engineers and I would gather at the office in the middle of the night.

In reality, almost nothing happens

There’s a common misunderstanding: this kind of late-night work isn’t actually grueling labor every time.

Most of it flows systematically.

Press a button, check the logs, monitor for anomalies.

So in the extreme, you don’t even need to be physically in the office.

But if something happens, you respond immediately.

In other words, it’s less “work” and more “standby.”

Still, I didn’t hate that atmosphere.

Once the closing processing finished safely, there was essentially nothing left to do.

We’d spread out beer and snacks in the office and chat aimlessly until the first train.

“That system is so old, isn’t it?”

“What tech do you want to touch next?”

“I have no idea what these new frameworks are doing.”

We’d spend from around 3 AM to 5 AM that way.

Of course, before leaving, we’d properly clean up the empty cans and trash.

That part matters as a working adult.

And naturally, we came in to the office in the afternoon the next day.

Well, that’s just how it works, normally.

Then came “come in first thing in the morning”

But at some point, the atmosphere shifted.

The CEO changed.

The new CEO had zero understanding of engineering.

And he started saying things like:

“The day after late-night work, please come in from the morning.”

I couldn’t understand it.

Late-night response isn’t just about “working hours.”

Mentally, you’re keyed up the whole time.

If a failure happens, you respond immediately.

Even when nothing happens, the standby itself is the work.

But to a manager who doesn’t know tech, it looks like:

“You were just sitting there, weren’t you?”

That, I think, was the first moment I started thinking about leaving that company.

When someone who only sees man-hours arrives, the team dies

After that, another decisive event happened.

The tech-savvy senior who actually understood things got fired.

In his place came a “technically a tech role, but really just a man-hour tracker” type — the kind of manager who comes from large-scale contract projects.

It was “man-hours, man-hours” all the time.

And yet, he had no interest in tech trends.

Negative about learning anything new.

“That works fine the way we’re doing it now, right?”

“Do you really need to learn new things?”

“It just adds more hours.”

That kind of atmosphere took over.

But engineers, fundamentally, are creatures driven by curiosity about technology.

They want to touch new things.

They want to improve.

They want to make things easier.

When that gets shut down completely, the team rots fast.

As a result, a lot of engineers quit.

I quit too.

Engineers are not “interchangeable parts”

Sometimes, people on the management side get this wrong.

They think engineers are completely interchangeable labor.

To put it bluntly:

“If they quit, just hire the next one.”

That’s the mindset.

Of course, every job has some replaceable aspect to it.

That’s true of restaurants, retail, anything.

But IT work — especially services that have been running for years — accumulates layers of human relationships, tacit knowledge, past incident history, and design philosophy that pile up in complex ways.

“Don’t touch this SQL — it’ll kill you.”

“This batch job behaves weirdly only at month-end.”

“This API still has legacy spec leftovers.”

That kind of knowledge is never written down in a manual.

So when you treat the team with contempt, it collapses all at once.

A workplace that thinks engineers are “swappable like McDonald’s crew” usually doesn’t go well.

…Actually, that might be rude to McDonald’s.

Maintaining their level of operation is itself pretty sophisticated.